Arthur Lewis is executive director of Our Public Airwaves, an advocacy group dedicated to the revitalization of public broadcasting in Canada.

CBC Television’s worst enemies are turning out to be the guys who run it.

Network bosses are now so totally focused on winning higher ratings they’re prepared to betray the basic principles of public broadcasting in the process.

CBC’s search for ratings is neither new nor bad. What’s new is the single-mindedness with which that goal is now being pursued. What’s bad is the degree to which the quest for viewers is going to skew programming decisions and the direction in which it’s going to skew them.

All of this became clear at the CFTPA conference in Ottawa last month when Richard Stursberg, EVP of English television, told independent producers that what CBC is looking for in terms of future programming is ‘increasing audiences.’

Back in November 2004, when CBC president Robert Rabinovitch was appearing before a parliamentary committee in support of his own reappointment, he declared that ‘ratings are not the primary objective.’ Apparently that’s changed.

For many years, the degree to which CBC has become dependent on commercial revenue has forced it to seek a difficult balance between programming to reach mass audiences and programming to fulfill its public broadcasting mandate.

To quote Rabinovitch again, this time from a speech last May titled Putting Creativity on the Air: ‘In order to justify the investment Canadians make in their public broadcaster, it means that CBC/Radio-Canada must provide them with services, stories, perspectives and programs they can’t find anywhere else…’

Rabinovitch also told his audience that ‘One factor in the slow decline of television is the lack of bold, risky programming ideas.’ But, he declared, ‘We have the flexibility to take programming risks that private broadcasters cannot.’

A few weeks ago, The Globe and Mail’s TV columnist, John Doyle, told us all about Alice. She’s the CBC’s new computer-generated target viewer. All new programming ideas are measured against her likes and dislikes. ‘Apparently, if Alice likes the idea, the show goes on the air. If Alice doesn’t like it, forget about it,’ Doyle wrote.

So much for taking ‘bold risks.’

The programming area where Alice will hold the greatest sway is primetime Canadian drama and entertainment, of which Stursberg is promising to add 100 hours over the next three seasons. He’s not sure how he’s going to pay for all those shows, but that’s another issue.

Series drama will be expected to do most of the heavy lifting in the drive for greater audiences. And that’s a good thing, given the shortage of Canadian drama in evidence today and all the hand-wringing about that shortage.

But what does Alice like to watch?

According to Stursberg, she wants dramas that are fast-paced, positive and redemptive, accessible and escapist with strong emotional appeal. You have to suspect that Alice may not be too bright, because Stursberg left out anything about stimulating her intelligence. Hey kids, can you say ‘dumbing down’?

Here’s Rabinovitch again, speaking to the Empire Club in Toronto earlier this month: ‘CBC Television should be taking risks and producing programs that innovate – Canadian equivalents to The Office from the U.K. or Six Feet Under from next door.’

Do Stursberg and Rabinovitch talk to each other? Would Alice watch Six Feet Under?

After betraying his two most intelligent drama series, Da Vinci’s City Hall and This Is Wonderland, by airing them without adequate promotion and then killing them off, Stursberg says he wants to find audiences of at least one million viewers for each drama and comedy series by going ‘fishing where the fish are.’

That’s where Alice comes in. Her likes and dislikes apparently represent the characteristics of programs that appeal to the largest group of TV viewers.

Alice and her friends also have strong likes and dislikes when it comes to documentaries and current affairs programming – strong narrative, again, and it helps a lot if the stories are accessible and emotional.

They’ll have to have those qualities in spades, because Stursberg says they won’t air on the CBC’s main channel unless they can draw an audience of at least 800,000. Under those conditions, say goodbye to documentaries on the CBC main channel.

All this prompted one woman in the audience at CFTPA to go to the microphone to challenge Stursberg: ‘It felt to me that those characteristics are similar to popular American drama. How did you arrive at those characteristics for our national public broadcaster?’ His response: ‘Those are the shows Canadians want to watch.’

As I listened to Stursberg’s pitch at CFTPA, one question ran through my mind: Had he used a single word to describe his programming plan that couldn’t have been used by programmers at CTV and Global? I couldn’t think of any. Nor could anyone seated around me.

In his zealous pursuit of ratings, Stursberg is like a wayward preacher whose congregation has fallen on hard times, so he makes a pact with the devil to pay the mortgage. Even if he wins, he still loses. And so do all Canadians who value intelligent and challenging programming on the CBC.